Einstein's Letter

This letter from Albert Einstein to President Franklin D. Roosevelt led to the Manhattan Engineering
District, also known as "the Manhattan Project," a national crash program racing to develop
atomic weapons before Nazi Germany. The Manhattan Project was the seed that grew into the modern
national laboratory system, which today includes many non-weapons-research laboratories, such as
Argonne.

Multimedia

Argonne nuclear
pioneers: Chicago Pile 1 on YouTube (by Argonne National Laboratory) On
December 2, 1942, 49 scientists, led by Enrico Fermi, made history when Chicago
Pile 1 (CP-1) went critical and produced the world's first self-sustaining, controlled
nuclear chain reaction. Seventy years later, two of the last surviving CP-1 pioneers,
Harold Agnew and Warren Nyer, recall that historic day.